“Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters,” Louise Erdrich writes in the early pages of “The Sentence,” boldly setting the tone of her new novel Published Nov. 9, 2021, “The Sentence” is packed tightly with the events of one fictional woman’s life between November 2019 and November 2020. Set in Minneapolis, the novel is profoundly current, deeply human and often raw. It follows an Ojibwe woman named Tookie as she lives through the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd and the following protests — all while working in a haunted bookshop.